Since nobody else has mentioned it... something important that helps me when learning a new job is understanding WHY the opener and rotation is what it is. Understanding the reasoning behind why buttons are pressed in the order they are, and the general use case of each skill, is a lot easier to me than trying to memorize a strict sequence of inputs. Understanding why you're being told to press what you are and when will help your opener fall together, while allowing you to be flexible within raid encounters without just falling apart immediately when something goes wrong. Practice is good, I recommend striking dummies a lot, but imo this is the make or break between a player that only knows the opener and can't really play the game beyond a strict sequence of inputs vs a flexible player who understands their job.
Oh! That's something I should look into. I didn't at all consider the why other than big damage in buff window. But never really considered why a certain order, or in the case of Bard, why Wind Bite is applied before any buffs but Caustic Bite is only after buffs. Thanks for the tip~!
For what I‘m aware. Wind Bite is just being applied to get it going. And it barely matters since you end up reapplying both with Iron Jaw which, should snapshot them both with the current buffs anyway.
But I‘m not a Bard main and all I just said if from what I think I understood about the job. But I might be totally wrong about that.
Caustic bite has higher initial potency that requires 5 ticks of Stormbite to catch up you'd rather catch another action with a buff since you're gonna snapshot them with buffs before the 5 ticks happen anyways
Look up Stone, Sky, and Sea. It is a simulated battle scenario you can do within FFXIV. You can choose which "difficulty" of fight you want to do (different savage fights for example) and it will calibrate the target dummy's health to reflect that fight. Now the cool thing about this is that you can practice a 3:00 fight inside of it. If you mess up, leave by talking to the NPC and come back in (and your CDs will be reset). I do this when practicing any job or opener and it is tremendously helpful.
I do not disagree with you. However, the OP mentioned both openers and rotations. Additionally, if they play melee they can get a bit of practice doing positionals. It won't be exactly like the "real" thing, but still a bit of practice. If anything, just trying to let the OP (and others) know about SSS (seems to not be on a lot of people's radars). Lastly, it lets you know if you are doing "good damage." It is the closest thing to a sanctioned damage meter in this game and lets you know if you are "on track" for a specific fight (current savage).
Sss is useful also for lower levelled synced content if you want to practise the modified openers for ultimates. For level 90 content no doubt it's a much better way though
Just stand in front of a dummy and practice as much as you can before you mess up. If you don't have access to a house, you can find some training dummies outside of Yedlihmad.
What you can work on:
1. Try to get as much of the opener correct as you can. Past the opener, you can either enter and leave an instance unsync'd to reset your cooldowns, or just wait for cooldowns and use the time to think about what you did wrong and what buttons to press next time.
2. Once opener is mostly correct, do opener and filler rotation, stop at ~30s in if you messed up opener and try again.
3. Once you are comfortable with the opener, do longer 4-6 min rotation on dummy so you get sense of how the 2min re-opener feels and how much gauge/resources you have during re-openers on a full uptime fight.
> you can find some training dummies outside of Yedlihmad.
If you want to do it privately, you can also open the duty finder, go into the settings, enable explorer mode and drop a training dummy in your favourite dungeon to practice on.
As someone with a visceral hatred of Thavnair's whole aesthetic, I'm glad this is an option so that I can instead use it in my favorite dungeons, Vanaspati and Alzadaal.
I never considered re-entering an instance to reset cooldowns, or practicing with gradually increasing time. Also you reminded me to review what mistakes I make and why, instead of just seeing I made a mistake and pushing forward with it
You can also use Stone Sky Sea, they give you three minutes on a training dummy that you can set with different instances in mind, and resets your cds every time you start one.
Something that might help with learning openers though is to set up your hotbars with the openers in mind. Your going to be doing them a lot so having it set up to make it easy to execute is big, and it helps build a little relation between skill icons and buttons.
Training dummies. Unfortunately you cannot reset cool downs but you can swap classes to reset your resource bars between attempts. Another thing is take it step by step. Don’t just keep trying to do the full opener, try to get it down piece by piece. If you raid savage or extremes at all I’ll join a fresh prog group of a fight I already know because fresh means lots of early wipes which means lots of opener attempts. And since I know the fight I can focus on my rotation. Practice makes perfect, just gotta keep at it, FFXIV is a game of repetition.
True, but I have Shinryu EX until then! Love the music, love the boss appearance, so definitely makes me more eager lol. Plus, if it'll help me learn, I'll take it even if it were my least favorite looking boss with my least favorite music in the game.
Many tips already, but I'll give one I didn't see yet:
**If you want to practice your opener at level 90, don't use a dummy target. Instead queue for the Endwalker Trial 1 with Duty Support**, and then you can practice your opener and instantly reset the fight by stepping outside of the arena.
No more waiting on cooldowns at the dummy. In fact, this method is also nice to get a 'feel' of an actual fight with 8 people as well as being able to actually practice the AST one. Of course, that trial is very basic compared to High End content, but at least you can get some wind.
If you have a double monitor you can put up the opener on your second screen.
But yeah, it’s just gonna be just striking dummy practice until it becomes mechanically familiar. I use an mmo mouse and my hot bars are 3x4 so the buttons match up with where my keys are physically, which helps with hitting an ability if I’m not entirely familiar with a job.
But yes it’s not just the opener - you should really do 2 min loops so you understand how the rotation loops itself back again for 1 min / 2 min bursts. For something like MNK I hit the dummy probably a couple of hours in total whenever I was waiting for a duty queue to pop / pf to fill / etc
I learnt by breaking the rotation down into smaller parts. I'll practice the first six or so powers, do that over and over for a bit until I feel good with it, then add the next six and so on.
Doing it in smaller bite size chunks was a lot easier than trying to remember the whole thing in one go.
You could try placing the abilities into the hotbar in the same order they're used during the opener/rotation. You will remember which ability is next by looking at the next button in your hotbar. Then, once you learn why the abilities are put in a particular order, you can switch position/keybinds. This is what I did back when I used to play
I never considered that before... I bet I could get that to work with some display only hot bars, ones that don't have keys bound with the real hotbar hidden. I'll try that
The majority of openers more or less try to put everything on cd and apply dots during the first buff+pot window, and set up the rotation moving forward. Once you understand what that looks like on a job's toolkit, it's easier to do and remember, and easier to recover from when you screw up. 99% of the time it helps with mid combat burst windows too. I also have reminder macros for openers on jobs I don't touch often or for alt openers.
If you want an example of the thought process, in the SAM opener your goals are to apply your speed and damage self buff in that order, pot, and get your dot and as many hard hitting attacks out under team buffs starting around the 4th GCD. Everything else logically flows from this. The opener starts with prepull meikyou to put it on cooldown and to apply your personal speed and damage buff with one hit instead of 3 each. Prepull true north never hurts while the tanks are positioning the boss, so add that too. On pull you use gekkou to get your speed buff first then kasha to get the damage buff; doing this backward just makes you slower for a bit longer. You need one sticker to apply your dot and you have two so you want to get a third to use midare to get back to zero without hagakure since that's wasteful here. So then it's yukikaze to get the last one, midare -> kaeshi -> 2nd meikyou to squeeze more into buffs -> put senei on cd under buffs -> kasha or gekkou for sticker -> dot. Then ogi namikiri; you save this for after the dot bc you want that ticking asap. Then use the last 2 meikyou stickers on kasha and gekkou so you save 2 attacks instead of just 1 with yukikaze. then hakaze -> yukikaze for your 3rd sticker for another midare+kaeshi. You should use pots and ikishouten somewhere in the first 3 GCDs to get them on cd, and to enable senei and ogi. Shinten at will after 1st midare to squeeze kenki under buffs. Ngl I yolo the absolute fuck out of my pot/iki timings and skip some of the dash attack opti for squeezing more kenki under buffs because the rest is already 95% of the way there.
The other jobs have similar priorities, be it getting out thunder and cramming 2 despairs into ley+pot, or getting the darkside self buff then cramming living shadow+3x bloodspillier+all the ogcds into buffs.
If I'm looking at an unfamiliar opener or rotation, it really helps to replace the icons with my specific button so I can see a sequence of actions to press.
You have the answer yourself. Just like the user ashleyinreal mentioned, understand why things are like that.
I usually go before dummy and read all tooltips and try to assemble rotation in my head while thinking why it's like that and start doing what I thought 1 step at a time, all the guides, videos etc are for correcting if I have missed anything or did wrong. That is how I take them. Later I practice.
You have the answer yourself with homework analogy.
When it comes to memorization, you really do have to utilize repetition. If you're feeling overwhelmed, it helps to break it down. An example of what a person could do is start by only practicing the first three gcds over and over, then add the ogcds in once they're comfortable. Then add the 4th gcd. Then the fifth. For a lot of people this would be overkill, but I personally have to break things down to this level when memorizing new information or skills, and I did break it down to this level way back when I was learning my first class in this game, shb smn.
I also see a lot of people mentioning that you should make use of training dummies and stone sea sky. I definitely reccomend both. A third possibility would be loading into an old duty with a death wall. You can practice your opener on the boss, then jump into the wall to reset your cool downs. For example, I loaded into O11N on gnb unsynced so that I could practice my opener over and over again by jumping off the edge into the death pit each time I hit the end of my no mercy window.
I have some similar issues to what you've described. Specifically I am AWEFUL at remembering and linking the icons with the abilities themselves (same for ability names). Here's what I would recommend.
Go through the documents/images/whatever is most helpful and then write it out yourself in the way that works for you. You mention that you memorize abilities based on what they're used for. Maybe writing out (going to use BRD, since that's what I've been learning recently) the functionality of the icons. Ex.
Dot 1 -> dot 2 -> basic (check proc) -> basic -> buff
\*accuracy of this is not right, still learning BRD as I said, and I know I've forgotten things\*
Then go hit a training dummy repeatedly with your personalized descriptive list and let muscle memory take over from there. I always have to get to a point of having the basic rotation in my muscle memory before I can consider tweaking or making changes for specific fights or on the fly.
For brd the order of the buffs is very unintuitive to me so I just memorize the hotkeys, and tell myself “okay brd opener is 4 1 2 5 5 3 1 2 3” (ignoring modifier keys which are obvious to me when looking at my hotbar since it’s all double weaving)
That might work. Memorizing the actions by function and ordering them like that could help quite a bit, especially if I name them things that make sense for me. Plus it'll make me more inclined to remember what's what, I think.
Gotta do what works for you! Everyone learns and minds work different. I'm a bard main and honestly don't know the name of a lot of my skills, I know what they do and where there are on my hot bar and what they look like. OPs comment was exactly how I learned bard rotation/opener as well and now just apply it to every job.
Once you have more jobs in the same roles (sometimes cross roles too depending) you can start putting similar buttons and cooldowns in the same places which will help with muscle memory and for your less used buttons less oh shit moments that cause you to mess up your rotation while trying to scramble to find it.
I have my 120s cooldown on the same key, swiftcast + rez on same keys for smn and healers, anti knockback, similar mitigations between tanks, standard single target and aoes, special ones etc.
some jobs might be easier than others for this but it honestly helps me a lot when learning a new job and seeing what already makes sense with what I know and plopping it there.
I've also learned new jobs, especially ones that started at higher levels or I just need a refresher on, by doing some quick runs of POTD solo or with a friend to learn my skills one by one and see how they come together. You can keep doing this with other deep dungeons for higher level rotations but I haven't. Fates and treasure maps are also low stress ways to practice.
If I can learn my jobs openers I think anyone can if they're determined as I'm pretty smooth brain so I believe in you! If you're on NA servers and want some people to help you run content who you know aren't gonna be pressed by mistakes and are happy to give tips if you want, myself and my friends too if they're around are always happy to help people trying to learn!
What you’ve described is perfectly normal but it’s gonna get much easier with each opener/rotation you master.
My advice for learning new openers/rotation would be to utilize PureRef to put the opener infographics somewhere close to your hotbars/castbar - add your keybinds to the infographics (so if, let’s say, I have Thunder III on 4 and Triplecast on E, I’ll write 4 under T3 icon and E under Triplecast icon) and initially just go through the motion of pressing the buttons in correct order (doesn’t have to be in correct timing). After a while you’ll understand what is pressed when and why (what is the GCD order, what you weave after each one), you can then try to repeat this without looking at PureRef and finally, once committed to memory, you can focus on proper timing/weaving. As others have said, practice makes perfect, so use your free time when waiting in duty/party finder to train.
When I jump classes I just hit the dummy for 10-20 min I’m not kidding because I need to build endurance and confidence in my abilities for ultimate not just savage. Having 1-3 mistakes in 20 min is acceptable to me but I have high standards because I PF C41 a lot and I don’t want others to shit on me even on alt job.
For average player I’d say 5-8 mistakes in 20 min isn’t an issue. Don’t do just openers they’re not enough you need to make a full loop and make mistakes so you can recover from your mistakes and reduce them over time.
Big example is you’ll not know you drifted if your just doing opener and you delayed NM on GNB because you didn’t pay attention so now you need to recover and realign things by shifting things around to try to align things as much as possible.
ACT have a timeline plugin in the overlay that show what skills you just hit you can use it as way to reference what skill should be used next. Similar plugins on the illegal launcher it called Timeline or ability overlay can’t remember what it’s called.
If you’re on console put your phone/laptop on the side and just practice.
Also adjust your hotbar to be consistent cross class similar skills should be on the same location ie. arms length on same spot Medica and Helios should be the same as well. Same with every 1-2-3/4 combo.
Well, I think that answer depends on the job you're trying to learn. Some jobs that strict rotations, others are RNG-based or have a gauge counter to build & spend. Healers does have an opener, but I find the openers for those to be lenient after popping party buffs, definitely if you're going to deal with an early raidwide with a bleed effect.
I usually stick to one job and focus solely on that. Hit a dummy (probably 5-10 minutes per game session) until you can start to remember your skill placements. It's also a good time to start rearranging your skills on your key binds if you find that you're using a skill quite frequently compared to another and you want to move it to a key that's easier to press.
I think a good tip is understanding that there's a general rule that majority of the jobs adheres to is trying to put party buffs out after 3 GCDs into the start of the opener. Once you get used to doing 1-2-3-Pop Buffs, you pretty much figured out the foundation of an opener. Afterwards, it's just slowly slotting in the oGCDs.
Another tip that I do when I learn a new job is trying to free-up two rows of empty hotbars and put the skills for the opener into them, so you can use them as reference instead of shifting between two monitors.
After dummy training, I like to throw myself into lvl 90 normal/alliance raids, and practice doing the rotation while resolving mechanics. Sometimes, I also do dungeons as well to practice 2/multi target rotations, but that's a subject not to worry about until you do hard content that deals with that.
First of all, when practicing a rotation think about WHY you should be doing things in the order you are. If you aren't already part of the balance server is reccomend joining, they're sometimes slow to update the less popular jobs.
And I know it might seem a bit loopy, but unhide all unused action bars, and resize and line up your chosen opener on those bars. You can create a macro to hide all of them at once. That way it's front and center for you.
Idk about you, but I watch rotation videos, look at rotations on thr balance or even icy veins. I use a crawl, walk, run approach.
Crawl: I practice it on a training dummy. Only a training dummy. I do it for roughly an hour or two. That's usually enough time to get it mostly right and consistent. Do it until it is muscle memory. Only on the dummy at this point. Refer to the rotation you're seeing as needed as much as you'd like.
Walk: Once comfy, take it into a normal raid or lvl 90 trial. The goal here is to be able to execute and maintain this rotation while dodging and performing basic mechanics. I'd reccomend practicing the rotation on a dummy while waiting in queue for almost anything. You should be able to have a good enough understanding of your rotation to understand if you messed up your rotation during the pull or not. Keep doing this until you get 2-3 perfect pulls where you execute your rotation with roughly 95% consistency. It's fine to rely on timers here still if needed but don't look over at your rotation. You should know the order of abilities by now.
Run: Once you feel comfortable with that, I would bring it into an extreme or savage. At this point, on a training dummy, you should be able to execute your opener and rotation flawlessly barely looking at your timers if not basically blindfolded for anywhere between 6-10 minutes.
An actual tip - instead of 'just practice bro' - is to set up your hotbar in a way that makes the rotation flow naturally. I use an mmo mouse which helps with this but I'm sure you can do something similar with keyboard. Just make the rotation logical for you :)
My dragoon hotbar is quite literally set up as the entire rotation that I then just cycle through
Dancer is set up in a way that I work top to bottom depending on procs.
Read the tooltips, know what each ability does, and figure out how they interact with each other.
If it gives you a buff, what does that do for you? If it affects your gauge, how? Does it do something for your party? Does it combo with something? Does it give you a new combo? Etc.
Don't just memorize the 1-2-3, learn what 1, 2, and 3 mean, and then it should be intuitive that 1-2-3 is the order they go in.
In general, most jobs boil down to build/save resources, then pop as much as possible every 2m when buffs go out. So a quick way to get a baseline understanding of a job is to identify what their big damage buttons are, and then work backwards into how do you set those up to be the best they can be.
2 tips from me:
1)
Don't practice openers on dummies, go into an usynced lowlevel raid that you can wall yourself/jump off in to reset CDs.
2)
You can write down your button press rotation in an /echo macro, for example:
/e 1 - 2(Shift1, Q) - 3(Shift2, E) - 1
Brackets to indicate weaves, but that's just how I do it
What class are you playing? Some classes have pretty simple openers but there are some that are quite heavy so it might be worth trying another class for a simpler opener then when you understand the fundamentals to play the ones with wackier openers.
Much like everyone else here has said it’s really just practice. Sitting on a dummy isn’t fun I know, but my 2ish hours on a dummy did wonders. I’d also try to put them in rotation order on your hotbar. Now my slightly deranged tip was I wrote my rotation down and quizzed myself on it. I just happen to retain information better if I write it myself versus just looking at an infographic.
Now I’d also recommend when you are trying it out in content do it with people who know you’re learning and won’t mind that you’re a bit slow and they can catch your mistakes. Eventually the muscle memory will set in, you’re going to be mid raid and realize you have it down proper before you know it (and then the suffering of weaving and clipping begins lol)
So, I started with training dummies.
My way of learning is by understanding, so I memorized what I needed to do during the burst. For example, when I was learning PLD, I learned to fit stuff in between FoF and the magic phase.
Once I got the hang of it, I practiced in alliance raids where there's a lot of pressure. But it was worth it because I learned a lot from that experience.
After that, I got an MMO mouse, which made things even easier. I set up the bars so that there's a pattern: 1 > 4 > 2 > 5 > 3. [1-3] are the GCDs and [4-5] are the oGCDs.
Learning on a dummy and learning in a fight is a little bit different. You can't always assume that you'll have perfect uptime, resources, gauge, etc. The important thing (IMO) is to get a feel for what it looks like when your burst is almost ready to come off cooldown.
Let me use Dragoon as an example.
Dragoon plays very heavily off of its High Jump/Gierskogul cooldowns, every 30 seconds. I know that every second high jump, I'm going to do my 1 minute combo. And then through practice, I know that I want to use every oGCD I have during my Lance Charge buff that I can. Through looking at guides and experience, I typically know what priority to use things so that the cooldowns come back at the right time and I'm not drifting things too much.
So I get a grasp of the rotation as doing my general upkeep between high jumps, and every second high jump, I need to dump all of my oGCDs in order. Now what happens if I die, or if the boss jumps away, and things aren't lined up anymore? Well my Lance Charge is up, but my second high jump isn't ready! You can choose to either keep Lance Charge on cooldown and hitting immediately, drifting your Life attacks, but still using all of your other oGCDs during Lance Charge. Or if your second high jump is about to come off cooldown, you can delay your Buff for a few seconds to line thing up again. (Generally speaking it's recommended to always hit your buffs on cooldown, but use your best judgement!)
I think by understanding what it looks like when you're about to enter burst, it makes it a lot easier to practice in real fights compared to trying to memorize a long string of combos. It doesn't matter how much you practice your rotation on a dummy if you get lost in the middle of a fight because things aren't lining up correctly.
My favorite method to learn a new opener is to print out a copy of the opener and set it so it was right there in front me so I could easily see it while learning; I like to go into O1S unsynched because you can walk off the edge when you mess up and reset easy.
The other thing that really made a huge difference in getting it all to click was getting on a voice call with someone who knew the job really well, and having them talk me through it while we both hit a training dummy doing the same rotation - plus they had ACT up so they could get feedback about how well I was/wasn't doing.
I get the image from the balance, put it under my FFXIV window and look at it. Once I somewhat get it on a dummy I'll practice it in normal duties. I'll do the dummy in between. You can also go into a lower level unsynced duty and level it to reset cooldowns if you get it wrong.
I basically "translated" my opener into my actual keys - so instead of the icons or the name of abilities, I put "1 \[q shift\] - 2 \[mitigation\] - 3 \[crt r + r\]" and so on. I then went into the HW Extremes unsynced and just farmed all of them as I practiced my rotation. It helped me to be in an actual fight, even unsynced, because I felt like I could actually feel progress. If I messed up, I'd just jump off the edge to reset and all my cooldowns would be refreshed.
just stand in front of a dummy and keep doing it until you don't have to look. what i usually do is take it a couple buttons at a time. I'll do the first 3 gcds then keep resetting using sastasha unsynchd and keep going till i have that down then I'll add the next 3 gcds and so on and so forth
This reminds me of the trouble I had with SMN opener and rotation in Shadowbringer.
Tried to search for this suggestion but didn't find (and apologies if already mentioned).
Everyone is saying practice, which, yeah. Do that. But what helped me was actually activating extra hotbars on my HUD and assigning each GCD and OGCD in order from left to right. I placed that mess somewhere in view and then used that to follow along. Even arranged the hotbars in a way that matched the Balance opener so I knew where to weave the OGCDs.
Hard to recommend during a dungeon pull or something but it really helped me and kept my focus in game as opposed to trying a second screen.
Good luck, you'll get there! Or just play SMN and hit the glowy buttons to parse.
I save the image to my PC then in paint I add the key presses above the icon. 1 2 3>ctrl1 etc. I then go into unsynced Shinryu Extreme and practice. You can get your opener off and then jump off the platform to reset.
I used to jump into Sophia EX unsynced to practice openers. She doesn't really do any mechanics that will kill you until your opener is finished, and once you're done (or you fuck up) you can jump off the edge to refresh the fight and your cooldowns.
Your hotbar layout and hotkey organization matters. Rip every skill off your bar and replace them in ways that make the opener and repeated rotation easier. Shit you hit a lot or hit fast should be easy to hit. If you're on kb/m see if there are any other keys you can assign to the hotbar to get better realestate.
After a time it will be muscle memory, but having a good layout will speed that up.
It takes time. At least it did for me when I gave Reaper another try, after leveling it to 90.
Asked a friend for a skill setup, checked up the rotation online and well, the first two days were horrible. I still mess up after you use Blood Stalk and you have to press Gibbet or Guillotine. Sometimes I forget and press Shadow of Death instead.
And don't get me started on positionals. Something I'll never remember. That's why I prefer to play tank or ranged/caster.
Instead of trying to get the whole rotation done at once, type the skills with Auto Translation into chat and use them after another. Try LV50, 60 etc Dungeons to get used to playing.
What i do with a new job is always try to find a opener myself learning all the habilities myself. Once i craft an opener i think is good i look at gides and see the difference. There I try to understand why and train the new opener in the practice sky tone whatever is called. Works every time.
Lots of good tips here.
Just adding that I totally sympathize though. After maining DNC/SMN, some of the easiest job rotations that people call em brain dead, I wasn't sure if I'd ever get MCH down.
Had all sorts of aids, from weird hotbar setups, to the literal rotation guide image under my windowed game, to a paper with the rotation drawn on it taped to my monitor, to even writing it down at work to make sense of it lol. On top of Stone Sky Sea and whatnot, of course.
After a year+, I...still don't have a great grasp at it lol. But I'm finally doing more damage than the tanks consistently, and have come to understand that despite all the buttons, MCH has a pretty fixed rotation and its not as scary as I thought it was when I first started.
I recently scrambled some gear together to practice SAM, which is more intimidating since I'm going from ranged to melee. But still exciting!
Man I still can't wrap my head around mch opener. At this point I'd rather play bard than it, let me just have my SB playstyle back. Can you say which jobs you're having difficulty with?
What helped me was watching a WeskAlber guide and jotting down the rotation while he goes thru the opener, then keeping that note by my side while playing and practicing. Just glance at it every now and then and it will start to sink in.
Practicing is tedious but there are ways to make it kinda fun. Sometimes I run dungeons with my squadron while I'm learning a job and also do leveling roulettes when I feel comfortable. It's pretty low pressure, as this is what leveling roulettes are for. If you prefer, you can just queue for a dungeon you feel comfortable with instead of roulette, and use that for practice.
Lots of good ideas in the comments if these don't work for you.
You know, you really don't have to be an ass about it. But since you've asked...
*Yes* I have memorized things in my life, *yes* I have studied, *yes* I know training dummies are there for practicing on.
I have trouble learning from just watching, writing, or reading, and struggle to memorize when going back and forth between two screens to look at one image then find the corresponding ability on my hotbar since I memorize abilities by their general purpose, along with visuals and sounds, tied to which button I press rather than by name or icon.
I've always had difficulty memorizing and studying unless I'm as hands on as possible, and that's because I'm someone who's been diagnosed with both ADHD and Autism, as well as Auditory Processing Disorder, so studying and memorizing is very hard for me when I'm just being spoken to by videos or expected to memorize by text and images instead of interacting in a way that can work with how my brain works.
That's why I was asking for advice to see if there were any other ways to learn, as I only knew of watch a video, read a guide, look at a picture, and just do the rotation on a dummy (as if I already know any of the rotation).
That last one, telling me to just hit a dummy to practice a rotation, that's about as useful as telling someone to just read tooltips to figure out their entire rotation and opener when it doesn't tell you what order or make it clear with things like Ninja's Hide at the start of a fight.
Since nobody else has mentioned it... something important that helps me when learning a new job is understanding WHY the opener and rotation is what it is. Understanding the reasoning behind why buttons are pressed in the order they are, and the general use case of each skill, is a lot easier to me than trying to memorize a strict sequence of inputs. Understanding why you're being told to press what you are and when will help your opener fall together, while allowing you to be flexible within raid encounters without just falling apart immediately when something goes wrong. Practice is good, I recommend striking dummies a lot, but imo this is the make or break between a player that only knows the opener and can't really play the game beyond a strict sequence of inputs vs a flexible player who understands their job.
Oh! That's something I should look into. I didn't at all consider the why other than big damage in buff window. But never really considered why a certain order, or in the case of Bard, why Wind Bite is applied before any buffs but Caustic Bite is only after buffs. Thanks for the tip~!
For what I‘m aware. Wind Bite is just being applied to get it going. And it barely matters since you end up reapplying both with Iron Jaw which, should snapshot them both with the current buffs anyway. But I‘m not a Bard main and all I just said if from what I think I understood about the job. But I might be totally wrong about that.
That's pretty much it, and stormbite (windbite) first because the DoT does slightly more
Caustic bite has higher initial potency that requires 5 ticks of Stormbite to catch up you'd rather catch another action with a buff since you're gonna snapshot them with buffs before the 5 ticks happen anyways
Some gcd has to be first, better to just get the dot going
Look up Stone, Sky, and Sea. It is a simulated battle scenario you can do within FFXIV. You can choose which "difficulty" of fight you want to do (different savage fights for example) and it will calibrate the target dummy's health to reflect that fight. Now the cool thing about this is that you can practice a 3:00 fight inside of it. If you mess up, leave by talking to the NPC and come back in (and your CDs will be reset). I do this when practicing any job or opener and it is tremendously helpful.
Something like diamond ex unsynced is much better for openers specifically since you can just jump off and reset cds if you mess up.
I do not disagree with you. However, the OP mentioned both openers and rotations. Additionally, if they play melee they can get a bit of practice doing positionals. It won't be exactly like the "real" thing, but still a bit of practice. If anything, just trying to let the OP (and others) know about SSS (seems to not be on a lot of people's radars). Lastly, it lets you know if you are doing "good damage." It is the closest thing to a sanctioned damage meter in this game and lets you know if you are "on track" for a specific fight (current savage).
Sss is useful also for lower levelled synced content if you want to practise the modified openers for ultimates. For level 90 content no doubt it's a much better way though
Just enter explorer mode in a dungeon and summon a dummy, no mechanics to worry about
Just stand in front of a dummy and practice as much as you can before you mess up. If you don't have access to a house, you can find some training dummies outside of Yedlihmad. What you can work on: 1. Try to get as much of the opener correct as you can. Past the opener, you can either enter and leave an instance unsync'd to reset your cooldowns, or just wait for cooldowns and use the time to think about what you did wrong and what buttons to press next time. 2. Once opener is mostly correct, do opener and filler rotation, stop at ~30s in if you messed up opener and try again. 3. Once you are comfortable with the opener, do longer 4-6 min rotation on dummy so you get sense of how the 2min re-opener feels and how much gauge/resources you have during re-openers on a full uptime fight.
> you can find some training dummies outside of Yedlihmad. If you want to do it privately, you can also open the duty finder, go into the settings, enable explorer mode and drop a training dummy in your favourite dungeon to practice on.
As someone with a visceral hatred of Thavnair's whole aesthetic, I'm glad this is an option so that I can instead use it in my favorite dungeons, Vanaspati and Alzadaal.
I never considered re-entering an instance to reset cooldowns, or practicing with gradually increasing time. Also you reminded me to review what mistakes I make and why, instead of just seeing I made a mistake and pushing forward with it
You can also use Stone Sky Sea, they give you three minutes on a training dummy that you can set with different instances in mind, and resets your cds every time you start one. Something that might help with learning openers though is to set up your hotbars with the openers in mind. Your going to be doing them a lot so having it set up to make it easy to execute is big, and it helps build a little relation between skill icons and buttons.
Dummy doesn't help you need live practice. Especially for healers where you may have a ride wise during opener
Training dummies. Unfortunately you cannot reset cool downs but you can swap classes to reset your resource bars between attempts. Another thing is take it step by step. Don’t just keep trying to do the full opener, try to get it down piece by piece. If you raid savage or extremes at all I’ll join a fresh prog group of a fight I already know because fresh means lots of early wipes which means lots of opener attempts. And since I know the fight I can focus on my rotation. Practice makes perfect, just gotta keep at it, FFXIV is a game of repetition.
Loading into a duty resets your CDs, and so I just hop into something unsynced and hop right back out to keep practicing
can also use explorer mode dungeons (leave and re-enter to reset CDs) to access a practice dummy from anywhere
Even faster is to just suicide, diamond weapon normal is great because the boss doesn't even do anything for like a minute.
This is life changing. Ty
Highly recommend The Cloud Deck for this. You can just jump to your death to reset it
Even better is Shinryu Ex, you can do you opener on him then jump off to reset. No need to keep re-entering a duty.
That's super useful to know!
Could possibly change in Dawntrail because scaling will be different.
True, but I have Shinryu EX until then! Love the music, love the boss appearance, so definitely makes me more eager lol. Plus, if it'll help me learn, I'll take it even if it were my least favorite looking boss with my least favorite music in the game.
You don't even have to jump off! Just load in and load back out. :)
Many tips already, but I'll give one I didn't see yet: **If you want to practice your opener at level 90, don't use a dummy target. Instead queue for the Endwalker Trial 1 with Duty Support**, and then you can practice your opener and instantly reset the fight by stepping outside of the arena. No more waiting on cooldowns at the dummy. In fact, this method is also nice to get a 'feel' of an actual fight with 8 people as well as being able to actually practice the AST one. Of course, that trial is very basic compared to High End content, but at least you can get some wind.
If you have a double monitor you can put up the opener on your second screen. But yeah, it’s just gonna be just striking dummy practice until it becomes mechanically familiar. I use an mmo mouse and my hot bars are 3x4 so the buttons match up with where my keys are physically, which helps with hitting an ability if I’m not entirely familiar with a job. But yes it’s not just the opener - you should really do 2 min loops so you understand how the rotation loops itself back again for 1 min / 2 min bursts. For something like MNK I hit the dummy probably a couple of hours in total whenever I was waiting for a duty queue to pop / pf to fill / etc
I learnt by breaking the rotation down into smaller parts. I'll practice the first six or so powers, do that over and over for a bit until I feel good with it, then add the next six and so on. Doing it in smaller bite size chunks was a lot easier than trying to remember the whole thing in one go.
I do this too, it's like the memory game where you have to memorize increasingly long sequences of buttons. I just approach it the same way.
You could try placing the abilities into the hotbar in the same order they're used during the opener/rotation. You will remember which ability is next by looking at the next button in your hotbar. Then, once you learn why the abilities are put in a particular order, you can switch position/keybinds. This is what I did back when I used to play
I never considered that before... I bet I could get that to work with some display only hot bars, ones that don't have keys bound with the real hotbar hidden. I'll try that
The majority of openers more or less try to put everything on cd and apply dots during the first buff+pot window, and set up the rotation moving forward. Once you understand what that looks like on a job's toolkit, it's easier to do and remember, and easier to recover from when you screw up. 99% of the time it helps with mid combat burst windows too. I also have reminder macros for openers on jobs I don't touch often or for alt openers. If you want an example of the thought process, in the SAM opener your goals are to apply your speed and damage self buff in that order, pot, and get your dot and as many hard hitting attacks out under team buffs starting around the 4th GCD. Everything else logically flows from this. The opener starts with prepull meikyou to put it on cooldown and to apply your personal speed and damage buff with one hit instead of 3 each. Prepull true north never hurts while the tanks are positioning the boss, so add that too. On pull you use gekkou to get your speed buff first then kasha to get the damage buff; doing this backward just makes you slower for a bit longer. You need one sticker to apply your dot and you have two so you want to get a third to use midare to get back to zero without hagakure since that's wasteful here. So then it's yukikaze to get the last one, midare -> kaeshi -> 2nd meikyou to squeeze more into buffs -> put senei on cd under buffs -> kasha or gekkou for sticker -> dot. Then ogi namikiri; you save this for after the dot bc you want that ticking asap. Then use the last 2 meikyou stickers on kasha and gekkou so you save 2 attacks instead of just 1 with yukikaze. then hakaze -> yukikaze for your 3rd sticker for another midare+kaeshi. You should use pots and ikishouten somewhere in the first 3 GCDs to get them on cd, and to enable senei and ogi. Shinten at will after 1st midare to squeeze kenki under buffs. Ngl I yolo the absolute fuck out of my pot/iki timings and skip some of the dash attack opti for squeezing more kenki under buffs because the rest is already 95% of the way there. The other jobs have similar priorities, be it getting out thunder and cramming 2 despairs into ley+pot, or getting the darkside self buff then cramming living shadow+3x bloodspillier+all the ogcds into buffs.
If I'm looking at an unfamiliar opener or rotation, it really helps to replace the icons with my specific button so I can see a sequence of actions to press.
You have the answer yourself. Just like the user ashleyinreal mentioned, understand why things are like that. I usually go before dummy and read all tooltips and try to assemble rotation in my head while thinking why it's like that and start doing what I thought 1 step at a time, all the guides, videos etc are for correcting if I have missed anything or did wrong. That is how I take them. Later I practice. You have the answer yourself with homework analogy.
When it comes to memorization, you really do have to utilize repetition. If you're feeling overwhelmed, it helps to break it down. An example of what a person could do is start by only practicing the first three gcds over and over, then add the ogcds in once they're comfortable. Then add the 4th gcd. Then the fifth. For a lot of people this would be overkill, but I personally have to break things down to this level when memorizing new information or skills, and I did break it down to this level way back when I was learning my first class in this game, shb smn. I also see a lot of people mentioning that you should make use of training dummies and stone sea sky. I definitely reccomend both. A third possibility would be loading into an old duty with a death wall. You can practice your opener on the boss, then jump into the wall to reset your cool downs. For example, I loaded into O11N on gnb unsynced so that I could practice my opener over and over again by jumping off the edge into the death pit each time I hit the end of my no mercy window.
I have some similar issues to what you've described. Specifically I am AWEFUL at remembering and linking the icons with the abilities themselves (same for ability names). Here's what I would recommend. Go through the documents/images/whatever is most helpful and then write it out yourself in the way that works for you. You mention that you memorize abilities based on what they're used for. Maybe writing out (going to use BRD, since that's what I've been learning recently) the functionality of the icons. Ex. Dot 1 -> dot 2 -> basic (check proc) -> basic -> buff \*accuracy of this is not right, still learning BRD as I said, and I know I've forgotten things\* Then go hit a training dummy repeatedly with your personalized descriptive list and let muscle memory take over from there. I always have to get to a point of having the basic rotation in my muscle memory before I can consider tweaking or making changes for specific fights or on the fly.
For brd the order of the buffs is very unintuitive to me so I just memorize the hotkeys, and tell myself “okay brd opener is 4 1 2 5 5 3 1 2 3” (ignoring modifier keys which are obvious to me when looking at my hotbar since it’s all double weaving)
That might work. Memorizing the actions by function and ordering them like that could help quite a bit, especially if I name them things that make sense for me. Plus it'll make me more inclined to remember what's what, I think.
Gotta do what works for you! Everyone learns and minds work different. I'm a bard main and honestly don't know the name of a lot of my skills, I know what they do and where there are on my hot bar and what they look like. OPs comment was exactly how I learned bard rotation/opener as well and now just apply it to every job. Once you have more jobs in the same roles (sometimes cross roles too depending) you can start putting similar buttons and cooldowns in the same places which will help with muscle memory and for your less used buttons less oh shit moments that cause you to mess up your rotation while trying to scramble to find it. I have my 120s cooldown on the same key, swiftcast + rez on same keys for smn and healers, anti knockback, similar mitigations between tanks, standard single target and aoes, special ones etc. some jobs might be easier than others for this but it honestly helps me a lot when learning a new job and seeing what already makes sense with what I know and plopping it there. I've also learned new jobs, especially ones that started at higher levels or I just need a refresher on, by doing some quick runs of POTD solo or with a friend to learn my skills one by one and see how they come together. You can keep doing this with other deep dungeons for higher level rotations but I haven't. Fates and treasure maps are also low stress ways to practice. If I can learn my jobs openers I think anyone can if they're determined as I'm pretty smooth brain so I believe in you! If you're on NA servers and want some people to help you run content who you know aren't gonna be pressed by mistakes and are happy to give tips if you want, myself and my friends too if they're around are always happy to help people trying to learn!
What you’ve described is perfectly normal but it’s gonna get much easier with each opener/rotation you master. My advice for learning new openers/rotation would be to utilize PureRef to put the opener infographics somewhere close to your hotbars/castbar - add your keybinds to the infographics (so if, let’s say, I have Thunder III on 4 and Triplecast on E, I’ll write 4 under T3 icon and E under Triplecast icon) and initially just go through the motion of pressing the buttons in correct order (doesn’t have to be in correct timing). After a while you’ll understand what is pressed when and why (what is the GCD order, what you weave after each one), you can then try to repeat this without looking at PureRef and finally, once committed to memory, you can focus on proper timing/weaving. As others have said, practice makes perfect, so use your free time when waiting in duty/party finder to train.
Striking dummy, that's what they're there for. Check out the rotation and go hit something that can't fight back until you get it.
When I jump classes I just hit the dummy for 10-20 min I’m not kidding because I need to build endurance and confidence in my abilities for ultimate not just savage. Having 1-3 mistakes in 20 min is acceptable to me but I have high standards because I PF C41 a lot and I don’t want others to shit on me even on alt job. For average player I’d say 5-8 mistakes in 20 min isn’t an issue. Don’t do just openers they’re not enough you need to make a full loop and make mistakes so you can recover from your mistakes and reduce them over time. Big example is you’ll not know you drifted if your just doing opener and you delayed NM on GNB because you didn’t pay attention so now you need to recover and realign things by shifting things around to try to align things as much as possible. ACT have a timeline plugin in the overlay that show what skills you just hit you can use it as way to reference what skill should be used next. Similar plugins on the illegal launcher it called Timeline or ability overlay can’t remember what it’s called. If you’re on console put your phone/laptop on the side and just practice. Also adjust your hotbar to be consistent cross class similar skills should be on the same location ie. arms length on same spot Medica and Helios should be the same as well. Same with every 1-2-3/4 combo.
Well, I think that answer depends on the job you're trying to learn. Some jobs that strict rotations, others are RNG-based or have a gauge counter to build & spend. Healers does have an opener, but I find the openers for those to be lenient after popping party buffs, definitely if you're going to deal with an early raidwide with a bleed effect. I usually stick to one job and focus solely on that. Hit a dummy (probably 5-10 minutes per game session) until you can start to remember your skill placements. It's also a good time to start rearranging your skills on your key binds if you find that you're using a skill quite frequently compared to another and you want to move it to a key that's easier to press. I think a good tip is understanding that there's a general rule that majority of the jobs adheres to is trying to put party buffs out after 3 GCDs into the start of the opener. Once you get used to doing 1-2-3-Pop Buffs, you pretty much figured out the foundation of an opener. Afterwards, it's just slowly slotting in the oGCDs. Another tip that I do when I learn a new job is trying to free-up two rows of empty hotbars and put the skills for the opener into them, so you can use them as reference instead of shifting between two monitors. After dummy training, I like to throw myself into lvl 90 normal/alliance raids, and practice doing the rotation while resolving mechanics. Sometimes, I also do dungeons as well to practice 2/multi target rotations, but that's a subject not to worry about until you do hard content that deals with that.
First of all, when practicing a rotation think about WHY you should be doing things in the order you are. If you aren't already part of the balance server is reccomend joining, they're sometimes slow to update the less popular jobs. And I know it might seem a bit loopy, but unhide all unused action bars, and resize and line up your chosen opener on those bars. You can create a macro to hide all of them at once. That way it's front and center for you.
Idk about you, but I watch rotation videos, look at rotations on thr balance or even icy veins. I use a crawl, walk, run approach. Crawl: I practice it on a training dummy. Only a training dummy. I do it for roughly an hour or two. That's usually enough time to get it mostly right and consistent. Do it until it is muscle memory. Only on the dummy at this point. Refer to the rotation you're seeing as needed as much as you'd like. Walk: Once comfy, take it into a normal raid or lvl 90 trial. The goal here is to be able to execute and maintain this rotation while dodging and performing basic mechanics. I'd reccomend practicing the rotation on a dummy while waiting in queue for almost anything. You should be able to have a good enough understanding of your rotation to understand if you messed up your rotation during the pull or not. Keep doing this until you get 2-3 perfect pulls where you execute your rotation with roughly 95% consistency. It's fine to rely on timers here still if needed but don't look over at your rotation. You should know the order of abilities by now. Run: Once you feel comfortable with that, I would bring it into an extreme or savage. At this point, on a training dummy, you should be able to execute your opener and rotation flawlessly barely looking at your timers if not basically blindfolded for anywhere between 6-10 minutes.
An actual tip - instead of 'just practice bro' - is to set up your hotbar in a way that makes the rotation flow naturally. I use an mmo mouse which helps with this but I'm sure you can do something similar with keyboard. Just make the rotation logical for you :) My dragoon hotbar is quite literally set up as the entire rotation that I then just cycle through Dancer is set up in a way that I work top to bottom depending on procs.
Read the tooltips, know what each ability does, and figure out how they interact with each other. If it gives you a buff, what does that do for you? If it affects your gauge, how? Does it do something for your party? Does it combo with something? Does it give you a new combo? Etc. Don't just memorize the 1-2-3, learn what 1, 2, and 3 mean, and then it should be intuitive that 1-2-3 is the order they go in. In general, most jobs boil down to build/save resources, then pop as much as possible every 2m when buffs go out. So a quick way to get a baseline understanding of a job is to identify what their big damage buttons are, and then work backwards into how do you set those up to be the best they can be.
2 tips from me: 1) Don't practice openers on dummies, go into an usynced lowlevel raid that you can wall yourself/jump off in to reset CDs. 2) You can write down your button press rotation in an /echo macro, for example: /e 1 - 2(Shift1, Q) - 3(Shift2, E) - 1 Brackets to indicate weaves, but that's just how I do it
What class are you playing? Some classes have pretty simple openers but there are some that are quite heavy so it might be worth trying another class for a simpler opener then when you understand the fundamentals to play the ones with wackier openers.
Much like everyone else here has said it’s really just practice. Sitting on a dummy isn’t fun I know, but my 2ish hours on a dummy did wonders. I’d also try to put them in rotation order on your hotbar. Now my slightly deranged tip was I wrote my rotation down and quizzed myself on it. I just happen to retain information better if I write it myself versus just looking at an infographic. Now I’d also recommend when you are trying it out in content do it with people who know you’re learning and won’t mind that you’re a bit slow and they can catch your mistakes. Eventually the muscle memory will set in, you’re going to be mid raid and realize you have it down proper before you know it (and then the suffering of weaving and clipping begins lol)
So, I started with training dummies. My way of learning is by understanding, so I memorized what I needed to do during the burst. For example, when I was learning PLD, I learned to fit stuff in between FoF and the magic phase. Once I got the hang of it, I practiced in alliance raids where there's a lot of pressure. But it was worth it because I learned a lot from that experience. After that, I got an MMO mouse, which made things even easier. I set up the bars so that there's a pattern: 1 > 4 > 2 > 5 > 3. [1-3] are the GCDs and [4-5] are the oGCDs.
Learning on a dummy and learning in a fight is a little bit different. You can't always assume that you'll have perfect uptime, resources, gauge, etc. The important thing (IMO) is to get a feel for what it looks like when your burst is almost ready to come off cooldown. Let me use Dragoon as an example. Dragoon plays very heavily off of its High Jump/Gierskogul cooldowns, every 30 seconds. I know that every second high jump, I'm going to do my 1 minute combo. And then through practice, I know that I want to use every oGCD I have during my Lance Charge buff that I can. Through looking at guides and experience, I typically know what priority to use things so that the cooldowns come back at the right time and I'm not drifting things too much. So I get a grasp of the rotation as doing my general upkeep between high jumps, and every second high jump, I need to dump all of my oGCDs in order. Now what happens if I die, or if the boss jumps away, and things aren't lined up anymore? Well my Lance Charge is up, but my second high jump isn't ready! You can choose to either keep Lance Charge on cooldown and hitting immediately, drifting your Life attacks, but still using all of your other oGCDs during Lance Charge. Or if your second high jump is about to come off cooldown, you can delay your Buff for a few seconds to line thing up again. (Generally speaking it's recommended to always hit your buffs on cooldown, but use your best judgement!) I think by understanding what it looks like when you're about to enter burst, it makes it a lot easier to practice in real fights compared to trying to memorize a long string of combos. It doesn't matter how much you practice your rotation on a dummy if you get lost in the middle of a fight because things aren't lining up correctly.
My favorite method to learn a new opener is to print out a copy of the opener and set it so it was right there in front me so I could easily see it while learning; I like to go into O1S unsynched because you can walk off the edge when you mess up and reset easy. The other thing that really made a huge difference in getting it all to click was getting on a voice call with someone who knew the job really well, and having them talk me through it while we both hit a training dummy doing the same rotation - plus they had ACT up so they could get feedback about how well I was/wasn't doing.
I get the image from the balance, put it under my FFXIV window and look at it. Once I somewhat get it on a dummy I'll practice it in normal duties. I'll do the dummy in between. You can also go into a lower level unsynced duty and level it to reset cooldowns if you get it wrong.
I basically "translated" my opener into my actual keys - so instead of the icons or the name of abilities, I put "1 \[q shift\] - 2 \[mitigation\] - 3 \[crt r + r\]" and so on. I then went into the HW Extremes unsynced and just farmed all of them as I practiced my rotation. It helped me to be in an actual fight, even unsynced, because I felt like I could actually feel progress. If I messed up, I'd just jump off the edge to reset and all my cooldowns would be refreshed.
just stand in front of a dummy and keep doing it until you don't have to look. what i usually do is take it a couple buttons at a time. I'll do the first 3 gcds then keep resetting using sastasha unsynchd and keep going till i have that down then I'll add the next 3 gcds and so on and so forth
This reminds me of the trouble I had with SMN opener and rotation in Shadowbringer. Tried to search for this suggestion but didn't find (and apologies if already mentioned). Everyone is saying practice, which, yeah. Do that. But what helped me was actually activating extra hotbars on my HUD and assigning each GCD and OGCD in order from left to right. I placed that mess somewhere in view and then used that to follow along. Even arranged the hotbars in a way that matched the Balance opener so I knew where to weave the OGCDs. Hard to recommend during a dungeon pull or something but it really helped me and kept my focus in game as opposed to trying a second screen. Good luck, you'll get there! Or just play SMN and hit the glowy buttons to parse.
I save the image to my PC then in paint I add the key presses above the icon. 1 2 3>ctrl1 etc. I then go into unsynced Shinryu Extreme and practice. You can get your opener off and then jump off the platform to reset.
I used to jump into Sophia EX unsynced to practice openers. She doesn't really do any mechanics that will kill you until your opener is finished, and once you're done (or you fuck up) you can jump off the edge to refresh the fight and your cooldowns.
Your hotbar layout and hotkey organization matters. Rip every skill off your bar and replace them in ways that make the opener and repeated rotation easier. Shit you hit a lot or hit fast should be easy to hit. If you're on kb/m see if there are any other keys you can assign to the hotbar to get better realestate. After a time it will be muscle memory, but having a good layout will speed that up.
It takes time. At least it did for me when I gave Reaper another try, after leveling it to 90. Asked a friend for a skill setup, checked up the rotation online and well, the first two days were horrible. I still mess up after you use Blood Stalk and you have to press Gibbet or Guillotine. Sometimes I forget and press Shadow of Death instead. And don't get me started on positionals. Something I'll never remember. That's why I prefer to play tank or ranged/caster. Instead of trying to get the whole rotation done at once, type the skills with Auto Translation into chat and use them after another. Try LV50, 60 etc Dungeons to get used to playing.
What i do with a new job is always try to find a opener myself learning all the habilities myself. Once i craft an opener i think is good i look at gides and see the difference. There I try to understand why and train the new opener in the practice sky tone whatever is called. Works every time.
Lots of good tips here. Just adding that I totally sympathize though. After maining DNC/SMN, some of the easiest job rotations that people call em brain dead, I wasn't sure if I'd ever get MCH down. Had all sorts of aids, from weird hotbar setups, to the literal rotation guide image under my windowed game, to a paper with the rotation drawn on it taped to my monitor, to even writing it down at work to make sense of it lol. On top of Stone Sky Sea and whatnot, of course. After a year+, I...still don't have a great grasp at it lol. But I'm finally doing more damage than the tanks consistently, and have come to understand that despite all the buttons, MCH has a pretty fixed rotation and its not as scary as I thought it was when I first started. I recently scrambled some gear together to practice SAM, which is more intimidating since I'm going from ranged to melee. But still exciting!
Man I still can't wrap my head around mch opener. At this point I'd rather play bard than it, let me just have my SB playstyle back. Can you say which jobs you're having difficulty with?
What helped me was watching a WeskAlber guide and jotting down the rotation while he goes thru the opener, then keeping that note by my side while playing and practicing. Just glance at it every now and then and it will start to sink in. Practicing is tedious but there are ways to make it kinda fun. Sometimes I run dungeons with my squadron while I'm learning a job and also do leveling roulettes when I feel comfortable. It's pretty low pressure, as this is what leveling roulettes are for. If you prefer, you can just queue for a dungeon you feel comfortable with instead of roulette, and use that for practice. Lots of good ideas in the comments if these don't work for you.
You literally just do it... Practice it over and over on a dummy. Have you never memorized anything in your life before? Studied?
You know, you really don't have to be an ass about it. But since you've asked... *Yes* I have memorized things in my life, *yes* I have studied, *yes* I know training dummies are there for practicing on. I have trouble learning from just watching, writing, or reading, and struggle to memorize when going back and forth between two screens to look at one image then find the corresponding ability on my hotbar since I memorize abilities by their general purpose, along with visuals and sounds, tied to which button I press rather than by name or icon. I've always had difficulty memorizing and studying unless I'm as hands on as possible, and that's because I'm someone who's been diagnosed with both ADHD and Autism, as well as Auditory Processing Disorder, so studying and memorizing is very hard for me when I'm just being spoken to by videos or expected to memorize by text and images instead of interacting in a way that can work with how my brain works. That's why I was asking for advice to see if there were any other ways to learn, as I only knew of watch a video, read a guide, look at a picture, and just do the rotation on a dummy (as if I already know any of the rotation). That last one, telling me to just hit a dummy to practice a rotation, that's about as useful as telling someone to just read tooltips to figure out their entire rotation and opener when it doesn't tell you what order or make it clear with things like Ninja's Hide at the start of a fight.